US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger • Hacker News Board

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#51

Post by neoburkian » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 2:00 AM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #41

reilly3000 wrote: post #9

US Antitrust law is among its most archaic, even though they are relatively young. Even the term Trust speaks to an a term that is no longer in common parlance. As there is discussion about 'breaking up' Facebook and others, the murkiness of the law is painfully clear. They should be referred to as competition laws, and they should be plainly understood and work at preventing and penalizing anti-competitive behavior.…

And such a law and the agency enforcing it need to be a lot more pro-active. By the time governments decide they need to "break-up a company", the lion's share of the damage has long been done against both small players (or potential entrants that never stood a chance) as well as consumers. This is why although I'm a bit supporter of GDPR and other such regulations, I think there is some truth in the idea that they a…

To quote the user wbl:

Aside from the transistor, negative feedback, Unix, troff, radio astronomy, the charge coupled device, cryptography, information theory, what did Bell Labs ever do for us? [1]

By the standard you set forward, we would have shut down Bell Labs BECAUSE it started to create these unquantifiably valuable inventions.

Google makes absurd amounts of money by search. Is it unethical to create an amazing search engine? Would it be better if Google said: "We aren't going to put money into moonshots, cancer research, laying fiber in Kansas, internet broadcasting balloons, AI research etc. We are going to take all of the money and pay it back to shareholders."?

I believe that your proposal, if put into practice, would amount to "we should destroy products that are successful". What am I missing?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20512519

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#52

Post by burfog » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

I'm not loving this, but there are far bigger problems. Unless we're preparing to undo the mergers that made Verizon and AT&T huge, it wouldn't be fair to stop a couple piddly little companies from merging. Maybe they need to merge for survival.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#53

Post by jpindar » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:07 AM UTC

Meanwhile, tmobile.com has been down (at least intermittently) for more than a week. Purely coincidence I'm sure.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#54

Post by Aloha » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #45

Aloha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprint has a pretty solid network in most markets, but they also have a metric crapton of debt. What it comes down to, is there isnt enough spectrum to have three fully competitive carriers. The merger of T-Mo and Sprint will give them a huge leverage point on spectrum. T-Mo bring 600, AWS bands, as well as 1900 PCS blocks, Sprint brings 2.6, 900 and 1900 PCS blocks.

I did the cellphone module for the EO PDAs back when there was just the "A" and the "B" ('Bell') carriers. I recall reading academic papers at the time pointing out that, technically, it would be most efficient to have a single swath of bandwidth assigned to a single company; instead, half went to 'A' and half went to 'B' -- guaranteeing a suboptimal technical solution. It's interesting to me that, at the time, they…

AMPS was designed prior to divestiture being a thing, but even with that in mind, no one really knew how fast cellular usage would take off, and so the carriers were caught somewhat flatfooted.

Consider that most cellular networks were originally built with omni antennas, not panel antennas, so the ability to reuse channels and channel-per-site density was noticeably lower.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#55

Post by icebraining » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #49

Consolidation is bad as it causes prices to rise.

Unless a consolidation of smaller companies helps them to compete against one or two giant ones, who would otherwise dominate the market.

Re: US government approves T-Mobile/Sprint merger

#56

Post by tipsysquid » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #33

koolba wrote: post #22

Assuming T-Mobile continues their multi-year policy of never raising prices on existing customers I'm all for this. One stronger competitor to AT&T and Verizon is much better than one almost competitor and an almost-dead-but-still-owns-bandwidth one.

I agree with the spirit of what you said, however I would upgrade T-Mobile in that analysis. They're a beast of a competitor without Sprint, and they're slow-stomping both AT&T and Verizon. Grinding gains persistently year after year. They're adding millions of customers per year in the US, nearly all of which are being stolen from the competition. AT&T and Verizon are sitting on stagnant wireless businesses, while T…

I used to think nearly the same way. But consider this systemic risk to wireless competition: If T-Mobile is not allowed to buyout/merge with Sprint, and Sprint continues the spiral that they are currently in, there is a possibility that AT&T and/or Verizon end up with more spectrum in the end. T-Mobile isn't nearly as capitalized to buy Sprint's premium spectrum on the open market like the other 2 competitors are.